Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God

By Brennan Manning

In his sequel to The Ragamuffin Gospel bestselling author Brennan Manning shows how true and radical trust in God can transform our lives.

Manning, beloved author and spiritual teacher, shows us how trust in God can transform our lives and open us up to deeper experiences of grace and love. In Ruthless Trust, he turns his focus from furious love to radical trust, revealing the ways in which trust renews our faith and help us grow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 12, 2010
• ISBN: 9780062030740

Brennan Manning

Brennan Manning is the bestselling author of many books, including The Ragamuffin Gospel and Ruthless Trust. He leads spiritual retreats in the United States and Europe for people of all ages and backgrounds.

Book preview

PREFACE

ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE the overriding issue for the ragamuffin rabble is the person of Jesus Christ.

Who and what are the ragamuffins? The unsung assembly of saved sinners who are little in their own sight, conscious of their brokenness and powerlessness before God, and who cast themselves on his Mercy. Startled by the extravagant love of God, they do not require success, fame, wealth, or power to validate their worth. Their spirit transcends all distinctions between the powerful and powerless, educated and illiterate, billionaires and bag ladies, high-tech geeks and low-tech nerds, males and females, the circus and the sanctuary.

"Here is a saying that you can rely on and nobody should doubt, ‘that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ (1 Tim. 1:15). Unglued and undone by personal experience of the Messiah of sinners, who searches the noisy streets of large cities and the unpaved roads of small hamlets, the ragamuffin walks the way of ruthless trust in the irreversible forgiveness of the Master. The defenses he has erected against his own truth as a saved sinner wither in the maelstrom of mercy flashing like lightning across his life.

If the Lord Jesus Christ has washed me in his own blood and forgiven all my sins, the ragamuffin whispers to herself, I cannot and must not refuse to forgive myself.

The ragamuffin resonates to the Pauline cry, "I know who it is that I have put my trust in" (2 Tim. 1:12). The felt knowledge of the tenderness of Jesus that lifts us, scarred and depressed after sin, gently to himself is the very soul of ragamuffin spirituality. After stumbling and falling, the ragamuffin does not sink into despondency and endless self-recrimination, she quickly repents, offers the broken moment to the Lord, and renews her trust in the Messiah of sinners. She knows that Jesus is comfortable with broken people who remember how to love.

Alert to the manipulations and machinations of Pharisaical self-righteousness, ragamuffins refuse to surrender control of their lives to rules and regulations. They see that the stale religiosity of legalists, trapped in the fatal narcissism of spiritual perfectionism, obscures the face of the God of Jesus. They will not barter their souls for the false security of fear-filled pieties that cripple the human spirit. The motto on the New Hampshire license plate, Live free or die, is the ragamuffin motto.

During the past three years of prayer, study, and soul-searching, the Holy Spirit has guided me to an inescapable conclusion: ruthless trust is the way for this ragamuffin. If it be your way, the sign you can trust will be the slow, steady, and miraculous transformation from self-rejection to self-acceptance rooted in the acceptance of Jesus Christ.

BRENNAN MANNING

New Orleans

15 March 2000

1

THE WAY OF TRUST

This book started writing itself with a remark from my spiritual director. Brennan, you don’t need any more insights into the faith, he observed. You’ve got enough insights to last you three hundred years. The most urgent need in your life is to trust what you have received.

That sounded simple enough. But his remark sparked a searing reexamination of my life, my ministry, and the authenticity of my relationship with God—a reexamination that spanned the next two years. The challenge to actually trust God forced me to deconstruct what I had spent my life constructing, to stop clutching what I was so afraid of losing, to question my personal investment in every word I had ever written or spoken about Jesus Christ and fearlessly to ask myself if I trusted him.

Through countless hours of silence, solitude, soul-searching, and prayer, I learned that the act of trust is an utterly ruthless act.

The film Chariots of Fire won the Oscar in 1981 as the best movie of the year. It dramatized the story of two British runners, Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, who captured gold medals in the 1924 Olympics. Heavy underdogs, the pair triumphed through a remarkable display of character, discipline, and courage. One scene in the film moved me in a profound way:

Lidell, an uncompromising Scottish Congregationalist, has been called by God to serve as a missionary in China at the conclusion of the games. However, his deeply religious sister fears that if her brother wins the gold, he will be so enamored of the fame and glory of an Olympic victory that he will opt out of his missionary vocation. On the eve of the race she pleads fervently with him not to run.

He looks at her with great affection and says, But God made me fast, and when I run I feel his pleasure.

The underlying premise of this book: the splendor of a human heart which trusts that it is loved gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, the sight of ten thousand butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom.

Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.

A venerable spiritual mentor, Paul de Jaegher, penned these words:

Trust is that rare and priceless treasure that wins us the affection of our heavenly Father. For him it has both charm and fascination. Among his countless children, whom he so greatly loves and whom he heaps with tenderness and favors, there are few indeed, who truly entrusting themselves to him, live as veritable children of God. There are as few who respond to his goodness by a trust at once filial and unshaken. And so it is that he welcomes with a love of predilection those souls, all too few in number, who in adversity as in joy, in tribulation and consolation, unfalteringly trust in his paternal love. Such souls truly delight and give immense pleasure to the heart of their heavenly Father. There is nothing he is not prepared to give them. Ask of me half of my Kingdom he cries to the trusting soul, and "I will give it to you.¹

Unwavering trust is a rare and precious thing because it often demands a degree of courage that borders on the heroic. When the shadow of Jesus’ cross falls across our lives in the form of failure, rejection, abandonment, betrayal, unemployment, loneliness, depression, the loss of a loved one; when we are deaf to everything but the shriek of our own pain; when the world around us suddenly seems a hostile, menacing place—at those times we may cry out in anguish, How could a loving God permit this to happen? At such moments the seeds of distrust are sown. It requires heroic courage to trust in the love of God no matter what happens to us.

The most brilliant student I ever taught in seminary was a young man named Augustus Gordon. He now lives as a hermit six months each year in a solitary cabin deep in the Smoky Mountains above Liberty, Tennessee. The remaining half-year he travels the country preaching the gospel on behalf of Food for the Poor, a missionary outreach feeding the hungry and homeless in Haiti, Jamaica, and other Caribbean islands.

On a recent visit I asked him, Gus, could you define the Christian life in a single sentence? He didn’t even blink before responding. Brennan, he said, I can define it in a single word: trust.

It has been more than four decades since I was first ambushed by Jesus in a little chapel in the Allegheny Mountains of western Pennsylvania. After thousands of hours of prayer and meditation over the intervening years, I can state unequivocally that childlike surrender in trust is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship. And I would add that the supreme need in most of our lives is often the most overlooked—namely, the need for an uncompromising trust in the love of God. Furthermore, I would say that, while there are times when it is good to go to God as might a ragged beggar to the King of kings, it is vastly superior to approach God as a little child would approach his or her papa.

In first-century Palestine the question dominating religious discussion was, How do we hasten the advent of the Kingdom of God? Jesus proposed a single way: the way of trust. He never asked his disciples to trust in God. Rather, he demanded of them bluntly, Trust in God and trust in me (John 14:1). Trust was not some feature out at the edges of Jesus" teaching; it was its heart and center. This and only this would bring on speedily the reign of God.

When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at the house of the dying in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa. She asked, And what can I do for you? Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.

What do you want me to pray for? she asked. He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: Pray that I have clarity.

She said firmly, No, I will not do that. When he asked her why, she said, Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of. When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.²

We ourselves have known and put our trust in God’s love toward ourselves (1 John 4:16). Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father’s active goodness and unrestricted love.

We often presume that trust will dispel the confusion, illuminate the darkness, vanquish the uncertainty, and redeem the times. But the crowd of witnesses in Hebrews 11 testifies that this is not the case. Our trust does not bring final clarity on this earth. It does not still the chaos or dull the pain or provide a crutch. When all else is unclear, the heart of trust says, as Jesus did on the cross, Into your hands I commit my spirit (Luke 23:46).

If we could free ourselves from the temptation to make faith a mindless assent to a dusty pawnshop of doctrinal beliefs, we would discover with alarm that the essence of biblical faith lies in trusting God. And, as Marcus Borg has noted, The first is a matter of the head, the second a matter of the heart. The first can leave us unchanged, the second intrinsically brings change.³

The faith that animates the Christian community is less a matter of believing in the existence of God than a practical trust in his loving care under whatever pressure. The stakes here are enormous, for I have not said in my heart, God exists, until I have said, I trust you. The first assertion is rational, abstract, a matter perhaps of natural theology, the mind laboring at its logic. The second is communion, bread on the tongue from an unseen hand.⁴ Against insurmountable obstacles and without a clue as to the outcome, the trusting heart says, Abba, I surrender my will and my life to you without any reservation and with boundless confidence, for you are my loving Father.

Though we often disregard our need for an unfaltering trust in the love of God, that need is the most urgent we have. It is the remedy for much of our sickness, melancholy, and self-hatred. The heart converted from mistrust to trust in the irreversible forgiveness of Jesus Christ is redeemed from the corrosive power of fear. The existential dread that salvation is reserved solely for the proper and pious, the nameless fear that we are predestined to backslide, the brooding pessimism that the good news of God’s love is simply wishful thinking—all these combine to weave a thin membrane of distrust that keeps us in a chronic state of anxiety.

The decisive (or what I call the second) conversion from mistrust to trust—a conversion that must be renewed daily—is the moment of sovereign deliverance from the warehouse of worry. So life-changing is this ultimate act of confidence in the acceptance of Jesus Christ that it can properly be called the hour of salvation. So often what is notoriously missing from the external, mechanized concept of salvation is self-acceptance, an experience that is internally personalized and rooted in the acceptance of Jesus Christ. It bids good riddance to unhealthy guilt, shame, remorse, and self-hatred. Anything less—self-rejection in any form—is a manifest sign of a lack of trust in the total sufficiency of Jesus’ saving work. Has he set me free from fear of the Father and dislike of myself, or has he not?

The grace-laden act of trust is the landmark decision of life outside of which nothing has value and inside of which every relationship and achievement, every success and failure derives its final meaning. Unbounded trust in the merciful love of the redeeming God deals a mortal blow to skepticism, cynicism, self-condemnation, and despair. It is our decisive YES to Christ’s command, "Trust in

Reviews for Ruthless Trust

[Melissa Short · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One word to describe this book...deep. If you are in a place of obscurity and looking for language to speak to it, this is your book. Brennan beautifully describes a crucial part of the deeper journey with Christ, “trust” in a way I don’t think I’ve heard anyone quite capture.